Always Mom, Forever Dad by Joanna Rowland

Within six months, our sweet Marisa, who I used to coach and who swam with my niece and daughters, passed away. About a month after trying to write about grief, our synchronized swimming team got devastating news that one of our beloved swimmers and coaches was diagnosed with cancer. I didn’t know what my story was, but I knew it needed to be written.

So then I knew I needed to write a book on grief. Something struck me in that moment of reading and I thought, What if I write a book about a child that goes back and forth between time with mom and time with dad? I wrote ALWAYS MOM FOREVER DAD based on that structure and it allowed me to write about divorce and separation and the child’s relationship with each parent in a positive light.Ī month before ALWAYS MOM FOREVER DAD was to be released, a relative that was intended to receive my picture book on divorce and was one the inspirations behind it, tragically lost her father. Her book went back and forth with memories of when she was little to her now big age of FOUR. I was reading WHEN I WAS LITTLE: A Four–Year-Old’s Memoir of Her Youth by Jamie Lee Curtis to my Kindergarten class. I knew I wanted the topic of divorce before I knew what my story was. With my first book ALWAYS MOM FOREVER DAD (Tilbury, 2014), I knew I wanted to write a positive picture book on divorce.

What I’ve learned about my writing process is that sometimes I get a topic before the story. The only problem was I didn’t have an idea of how to tackle the story. So there on my second day of Storystorm I just wrote the word storm. In January 2017, I was up at the family cabin when a snow storm came in. Luckily, as a teacher I have the beginning of January off so I can really focus on Storystorm at kickoff. I had just sold my second picture book THE MEMORY BOX: A BOOK ABOUT GRIEF in November of 2016 and I needed some time to figure out what to write about next. I used to try and fail at NaNoWriMo, but writing 31 different ideas for a month sounded like a goal I could reach and it would be fun.

Then I discovered Tara Lazar’s Storystorm (formerly PiBoIdMo). Not only does she have a great blog that is full of resources and is helpful to writers, but she’s also a great author herself. A few years ago I started following Tara Lazar on Twitter.

Always Mom, Forever Dad by Joanna Rowland